No, it's just routine (and useful) reporting on the everday business of spycraft.
It's funny how they always say the KGB/SVR is the counterpart to the the CIA but never describe the CIA as the counterpart to the KGB/SVR.
It's called an "analogy", and it's a pretty useful tool of expression. Particularly for describing "Y, the counterpart of X" where X is a large agency in the (very large) country you live in.
So really, I just don't get the "scare" component you're driving at.
Is this a reference to "the SVR, Moscow’s version of the CIA"? Don't you usually use the construction "X is the counterpart to Y" when Y is the more familiar to the intended audience? I don't see anything sinister here, at least in this grammar construction.
Compare:
"Pachinko, the Japanese version of a slot machine."
"A slot machine, the American version of pachinko."
Which version is intended for an American audience? Which for an audience familiar with Japan? There's nothing nefarious here.
If that stands out to you, I think you may be looking too hard for bias to the point where you're seeing things that aren't there. Keeping an eye out for bias is a good thing. It can be sometimes difficult to keep it calibrated.
Anyway, this is getting off-topic. I'm done.
Maybe I've binged too much on 1970s and 1980s news with the benefit of hindsight, and it's coloring what I expect my perception of today's fluff pieces to be if I read them again in 30 years.
The CIA, KGB and MI5 are Hollywood staples; the SVR isn't, yet.
(In a similar way GCHQ is often described as "the UK's counterpart to the NSA" or words to that effect).
"The espionage story of the year, and perhaps one of the greatest foreign operations in decades, has undoubtedly been Russia’s successful effort to influence this fall’s presidential election through hacking—penetrating Democratic National Committee servers and the e-mail account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman."
Those are the questions you should be asking.
They may be telling the truth. They may be telling part of the truth. They may be lying.
And these are just the generic reasons. In this particular case, the first obvious question is why NSA et al. would ever state their certainty in a Russian attack publicly. There are no good outcomes. Either they are right and the Russians blow up the bridges as they retreat or they are wrong and the Russians know they are incompetent.
> I trust in DKIM signatures. Any statement by an intelligence service ever is caked in multiple layers of conflicting motivations from expanding their budget, pleasing their lax overseers, deflecting incompetence to confusing adversaries.
That is some of the motivations, the negative ones, but you fail to list all the reasons they wouldn't want to lie to make your argument sound stronger.
I understand being skeptical of an intelligence service, but all intelligence services? Well, you'd have to have a pretty strong reason to doubt.
Nothing to do with LinkedIn as far as I can see.
Tl;dr: Russian spy brought bug into secure facility, revealed other spies. FBI deals with it.
> By day, Buryakov lived the ordinary life of a Wall Street analyst: reading and writing reports; attending meetings, conferences, and parties; building connections on LinkedIn.
But its an interesting read, even with the weird title...